Our original roundup of 100 Web Apps to Rule Them All was published in May, 2011. Nearly a year later, we’re back with over a dozen new apps … and sadly with a few of our original favorites removed since they hit the deadpool. We’ve added the newest apps to the top of this roundup article, so you can quickly see our new favorites.

Today, more than ever before, you can get much of your work done right from your browser. There’s web apps for almost everything, and increasingly they work from mobile devices, have beautifully designed interfaces that rival native apps, and work together to make your online life easier. Some have stayed the same for years, veteran standbys of the online world, while others have rapidly iterated, quickly becoming must-have apps that set the standard for the next generation of web apps.

Whether you’re just getting started using web apps, or are a longtime fan of web apps and would like to find more exciting apps, you’ll be sure to find something interesting here. There’s no way to include every web app, but we’ve included ~~100~~ 111 of the apps that we think are the very best in their categories. If you’ve got a favorite app that’s not included, feel free to add it in the comments below.

Enjoy!

The Newest Web Apps to Rule Them All

We’ve got a ton of great apps from our original roundup that you should still check out, but there’s tons more that have stood out over the past months as apps that are leading in their respective categories. There’s been an explosion in new task management apps, as well as new simple apps that do one thing well or integrate deeply with other apps. And if that’s not enough for you, check out our roundup of 30 Awesome Web Apps for Your iPad.

ifttt

Web apps have the bad habit of often not working together. We expect Preview and Photoshop to work together seamlessly, but somehow we’ve accepted the fact that web apps are usually isolated and act like they’re the only app out there. Not any more. With ifttt, you can tie your web apps together and make your own Automator for your favorite web apps. It’s simply amazing.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Use Ifttt to Make the Internet Work for You

TinyLetter

There’s a million ways to send out an email newsletter, but most of them are way too complex to just send out a quick message to your friends and supporters. TinyLetter takes the complexity out, and makes sending a bulk email out as easy as sending a normal email in Gmail. It’s so good, MailChimp bought them out, and kept the service running for free. And keeps improving it. Now that’s impressive.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Start Your Own Email Newsletter the Easy Way with TinyLetter

Wunderkit

Wunderlist took the world by storm last year as a free synced to-do list tool for almost every platform imaginable. Its bigger sibling, Wunderkit, was easily one of the most anticipated web apps of the year, as Wunderlist had built up high expectations for its professional version. It’s brought tasks and collaboration together, made it work like a social network, and then made most of it available for free. And it’s now open to everyone.

Price: Free; $4.99/user/month for Pro features
AppStorm Review: Wunderkit Beta: A Beautiful Task Management System

We should also mention that there’s a whole world of new task/project apps on the web right now, in addition to the ones we’ve included in this roundup. Some more new ones you might want to try out include Asana, Do.com, and Orchestra.

Kindle

If I’m buying an eBook from an online bookstore, and not as a straight ePub or PDF, there’s only one store I’ll use: Kindle. I’ve never owned a Kindle device, but with Kindle apps on almost every platform, I can read my books anywhere and always feel safe with my eBooks. Now, you can even read your books right in your browser, so you’ll really always be able to read your books, even offline with its HTML5 offline storage support. eBooks just got a whole lot better.

Price: Free, though you might need to buy some eBooks to fill your library!
AppStorm Review: Read Your Kindle Books Online With Kindle Cloud Reader

iCloud

Apple’s finally come through with a top-notch suite of web apps for email, calendar, and contacts, making your browser feel like it got turned into an iPad. Best of all, iCloud is free with iOS or OS X, unlike their previous $99/year MobileMe. Its best feature, though, is cloud syncing between apps, which is making iOS and OS X more integrated than ever before. Steve Jobs wanted to buy out Dropbox, but with iCloud, Apple’s trying to reinvent the very way we use and sync files, while giving us some amazingly beautiful web apps, too.

Price: Free with iOS 5 or OS X Lion and newer
AppStorm articles about iCloud

Typerighter

Typerighter is a beautifully clean writing app with a simple command-driven interaction that makes it quicker to write and share your thoughts online. You can create notes with things you need to write often, and then enter them directly into other notes with a shortcode. Or, format your writing with Markdown and publish it to the world by adding a #public tag. It’s my new favorite way to write.

Price: $6.41+ one-time for a basic account; $9/month for Typerighter Pro
AppStorm Review: Typerighter: Typing in your Browser, the Righter Way

LessAccounting

Accounting is a necessary evil, but few of us find it fun or simple. LessAccounting tries to take some of the pain out of accounting, and has proven to be a popular financial tool with our readers. Anything that could make tax time less nerve-wracking sounds good to me!

Price: $30/month
AppStorm Review: Keeping Your Books In Check With LessAccounting

Lemon

Speaking of accounting, Lemon is a great tool to keep up with what you’re spending. You can add a scan of your receipts or take a picture of them from your phone, and Lemon will organize and categorize them automatically. Now you can see exactly where your money is going … without even spending any more money.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Lemon: An Easy Way to Track Your Expenses

Trello

The folks at Fog Creak Software surprised the world with their newest web app last year: Trello. This unique project management tool works like a kanban board, and lets you collaborate and complete tasks without dealing with multiple parts of an app. It’s a responsive web app, too, so it works great on any screen size.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Trello: An Online Bulletin Board For Your Tasks

Do It (tomorrow)

For most of our personal tasks, many to-do lists are simply overkill. Sometimes it’s better to just think about what you need to do today, and then push off the rest until tomorrow. That’s what this simple web app offers. With an interface that looks more like a Moleskine journal than a web app, you can add tasks and mark them off, without worrying about schedules or anything else.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Do It (Tomorrow) – A Beautiful and Simple Task List

Calepin

Making a new blog or site shouldn’t be complicated, but it often is. Calepin makes it drop-dead simple: just create an account, link your Dropbox, and save Markdown-formatted txt files in the Calepin folder in Dropbox. That’s it. Calepin will make a clean site for your writing, and you’ll never have to worry about managing your site again. Plus, everything’s always backed up on your computer.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Markdown + Dropbox = Dead Simple Blogging With Calepin

Tiki-Toki

Want to create a beautifully designed web-based timeline? Tiki-Toki might be just what the doctor ordered. You can add your own events, describe them with images, video, and text, and Tiki-Toki will do the rest. You can even collaborate on timelines with your team, or embed them live on your site.

Price: Free; $5+/month

&!

Have you ever thought that you’d love to organize projects in Twitter? Perhaps now, you can. &! (pronounced ‘AndBang‘) has a unique name and an interface that looks like Twitter for Mac (or Sparrow, or any of the other similarly designed Mac apps today). It’s a great way to keep your team on track without getting bogged down by an overly intensive project management app, communicating with small Twitter style messages instead of time-heavy chat.

Price: $10/month/member; first 2 members free
AppStorm Review: Collaborate and Organize Your Team with AndBang

Picful

Instagram’s taken the iOS world by storm, quickly becoming one of the most popular ways to quickly tweak and share pictures of the things you see everyday. Picful brings the same artsy effects to your browser, letting you one-click tweak your pictures or take the effects further to make your pictures look just like you want, and share them directly with your friends online.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Add Some Zing to Your Photos with PicFull

Clipboard

Copying and pasting from the web doesn’t often work like you’d want. Anyone who’s tried to paste stuff from the web into a Word document has found that. Clipboard is a new beta app that’s reinvented the way clipping online works. With a simple bookmarklet, you can get just the content you want saved for your own keeping or to share with others.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: The Clipboard, Reinvented For The Web

The Originals

And, here’s our original Web Apps to Rule them all. Unfortunately, we’ve had to remove 280 Slides, Picnik, Jaycut, and MobileMe. They’ve all been killed, though Picnik’s features have been added to Google+ Pictures and MobileMe’s been replaced with iCloud, a great replacement in our opinion. Many of the apps have added new features and improved, so you’ll still want to check them all out.

Files

Although many apps today store data without us having to worry about where we save their files, we still have many individual files we need to store and share today. Some of the web apps we rely on the most are designed to make it easier to keep up with your files wherever you are.

Dropbox

If there’s one web app that helped us see the power of keeping all of our data available all the time, anywhere, it’s Dropbox. Despite controversy about security and doubts that people would really want to sync and store their files online, Dropbox has been one of the best successes of the Web 2.0 era. Mobile apps have guaranteed it’ll continue to be popular, as Dropbox sync is built into many of the most popular iOS apps.

Price: Free, $9.99+/month
AppStorm Articles about Dropbox

Ge.tt

Sometimes you need to share a file quickly, and can’t wait for it to upload. We’ve all been frustrated by having to wait on an image to upload to Gmail before we can send a document. Ge.tt takes that frustration away by giving you a short link that you can go ahead and share while your files are still uploading.

Price: Free

CloudApp

CloudApp is an incredibly popular way to quickly share files, screenshots, and links from your Mac menubar or Windows taskbar. You can also use this simple file sharing service straight from their web app, no matter what computer you’re on. If you’re looking for a better way to share pictures than Twitpic, this might be just what the doctor ordered.

Price: Free, $5/month
AppStorm Review: Share Files and Links With CloudApp

Let's Crate

Let’s Crate

Most of us organize files into folders, but Let’s Crate works a bit different. It lets you organize your files into crates, so you can share unique sets of files quickly. Plus, you can just drag and drop files to upload them. Couldn’t get much easier than that.

Price: Free, $4-$60/month

Presentations

Boring business meetings have given PowerPoint presentations a bad name, but these web apps prove that presentations can be engaging and interesting. Plus, they’re yet another reminder that sometimes, you can do things with web apps that aren’t even available in traditional applications!

Animoto

Have you ever wished that you could create a snazzy presentation about your family, vacation, or project that looked like it was made by Hollywood pros? Even though Movie Maker and iMovie are supposed to be easy, most of us can’t make very nice videos with them. Animoto takes your pictures and videos, and turns them into a fancy, animated show that’s guranteed to impress. You’ll have to try it yourself to see!

Price: Free, $5-$39/month
AppStorm Review: The End of Slideshows: Animoto

SlideRocket

If you’ve ever felt discouraged after looking through PowerPoint’s default templates, then SlideRocket might be the presentation app you need. Filled with beautiful slide designs, color palates, and rich media integration, you’ll be making presentations that wow your audience easier than ever. Best of all, you can include rich web info in real-time, to show live Tweets and more right during your presentation.

Price: Free, $24/month
AppStorm Articles about SlideRocket

Prezi

PowerPoint hemmed us into one style of presenting, but there’s so much more you can do with dynamic presentations. Prezi lets you create unique zooming presentations that work like a mix between PowerPoint and a Mindmap. You’ve likely seen some of the awesome Prezi presentations used in videos from TED and others; here’s your chance to create your own!

Price: Free, $59/yr, $159/yr
AppStorm Review: Spice Up Your Presentations With Prezi

Bookmarking

While it may be easier to use web apps than installing traditional desktop programs, we still have to keep up with all of our favorite apps and sites. There are many great bookmarking tools that make it easy to always find your favorite sites, no matter where you are.

Pinboard

When you need to find your favorites sites and web apps, you shouldn’t have to wait forever for your bookmarking tool to load. Pinboard.in is a great service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite sites, and then stays out of the way. It loads amazingly fast, and stands for everything Delicious fans loved back when it was first launched.

Price: $9+, $25/year for site archival
AppStorm Review: Save & Secure Bookmarks With Pinboard

Zootool

As we all know from Google searches, it can sometimes be hard to find what you’re looking for from a page of plain blue links. Zootool is designed to make bookmarking creative. You can clip images from sites, organize bookmarked sites into packs, then flip through your shots of sites anytime for quick inspiration. It turns the jungle of the web into a beautifully curated zoo!

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Zootool: Creative & Fun Bookmarking

Historious

Face it: odds are, you’re not going to remember the name of that awesome site you bookmarked. You’re not even likely to remember what you tagged it with. Historious is a bookmarking service that turns your saved links into your own personal search engine. It will cache the contents of the sites you add, and then let you find them just like you would in Google. Except this time, all of the results are sites you love!

Price: Free, $2.97 monthly or $19.95/yr
AppStorm Review: Ditch Bookmarking With Search-Powered Historious

Wayback Machine

Looking for a site that seems to have disappeared from the internet? The Wayback Machine is an impressive project that aims to archive the best of the web so you can go back and find deleted pages and see how the internet looked way back at the beginning of time in, oh, 1996.

Price: Free

Diary

Life has a tendency to throw curveballs at us, and it’s often nice to keep up with what’s happened in your life. We may be more rushed than ever before in our wired world of today, but these apps can help you remember the important and special things you’d never want to forget.

OhLife

Writing a journal doesn’t have to be difficult, especially with OhLife. You can simply respond to its emailed question each day, and before you know it, you’ll have an elegant journal that lets you see what you’ve been up to.

Price: Free
AppStorm Review: Keep a Diary With OhLife

Penzu

Want a way to privately store all of your thoughts and memories? Penzu offers a fully customizable online diary, where you can add your thoughts and pictures about what’s going on in your life. With HTML5 support designed for mobile devices, you can write wherever you want. You can even share your thoughts with the world with the optional public link or email sharing.

Price: Free, $9.99/yr Pro
AppStorm Review: A Private Web: Digital Journal with Penzu

Tumblr

While Tumblr may not be designed as a journal, it’s one of the best ways to quickly share what’s going on in your life with family and friends. Tumblr blogs take almost no maintence, and can be decked out with some of the nicest themes on the web. Share images, videos, quotes, and more with the world, or with your closest friends and family with password protected blogs.

Price: Free, Premium upgrades and themes avilable
AppStorm Article: 15 Awesome Tumblr Themes

To-dos

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with everything you’ve got to do. There’s a wealth of apps today that aim to make it easier to keep up with your tasks, and here are some of the best.

Remember The Milk

The original web app task list, Remember The Milk has remained one of the most popular web apps for years. It’s a simple way to keep up with everything you need to do, from finishing your freelance projects to, well, picking up the milk at the store. With polished mobile apps, it’s staying a strong competitor in the productivity market.

Price: Free, $25/yr premium
AppStorm Article: Getting Things Done with Remember The Milk

TeuxDeux

TeuxDeux brings simplicity to your confusing task list. You can arrange your tasks by the date you need to do them in the clean Swiss inspired interface, and even keep up with unscheduled tasks in a Someday bucket. If you’ve found other task managers with tags, lists, notes, and more too confusing, this might be the simple solution you’ve been looking for.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: TeuxDeux: Getting Things Done With Simplicity and Style

Wunderlist

The web isn’t lacking for todo list apps, but often they’re not as beautifully designed as their Mac and iOS counterparts. Wunderlist brought their entire app to the web, with the same fluid interface and great design that won fans over when it was just a desktop app. You can share tasks with friends to collaborate, keep all of your devices in sync, or check on your projects anytime from their web interface, all for free.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: Wunderlist: The Todo List App to Beat

Flow

If there’s ever been a web app that impressed us, it’s Flow. The Metalab team put together a web app that feels incredibly like a Mac desktop app. It’s a full-featured task and project manager, and works especially great for keeping your team working together on tasks. It takes the best of todo list apps like Things, combined with the best of project managers like Basecamp, and puts it all together in a beautiful web app.

Price: $9.99/month
AppStorm Article: Flow: Task Management With Mac Sex Appeal

Coolendar

Coolendar is a todo list built around a calendar. It’s got a nicely designed interface, and is quick to use as it can interpertate natural language so you can schedule tasks just by typing them in. Most uniquely, it includes a special web app designed for the Kindle browser, which is something very few web apps are designed for.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: Manage Time Simply With Coolendar

Coding

The web has opened the world of coding and design to millions, by giving us an easy way to show off our creations and study from the best designs by viewing the source code of our favorite sites. How about writing your own new code in the browser? Here’s some apps that can help.

Kodingen

It shouldn’t take expensive copies of Photoshop and code editors to get your site or app up and running. Kodingen gives you all the tools you need right in your browser. You can edit code and images right from the same app, track changes, and publish it live. There are many tools to do each of these things online, but Kodingen brings it all together, so you can use everything from one tab, seamlessly. Now that’s an integrated development environment!

Price: Free

GitHub

GitHub brings the best of web collaboration tools together with the power of the Git code version control system to make one of the best programming tools on the internet. GitHub has been one of the major forces behind Git’s increased popularity, and today you can found hundreds of opensource code projects on it, ready to fork and learn from. Plus, you can use it to keep your team’s code private and secure, as hundreds of companies are already doing.

Price: Free public repositories, $7-$200/month

CodeRun

Want to branch out and code for the Microsoft web environment? CodeRun gives you the tools you need to program in C# in your browser, letting you debug and compile your code without ever touching a desktop app. You can also write PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript right in CodeRun, just like you would in a standard IDE.

Price: Free

Javascript PC Emulator

We all know that web apps are powerful, but did you ever imagine you could emulate a full PC in Javascript in a browser? Renown programmer Fabrice Bellard has done the seemingly impossible, and coded a full Linux virtual machine in pure Javascript. Amazingly enough, you can now run Emacs and compile code in gcc on your iPad without jailbreaking thanks to the power of the web! Mindblowing.

Price: Free

Learning

Sometimes, it’s time to get back to the basics and learn something new. Here’s some apps that can help you broaden your mind, online and off.

WolframAlpha

IBM’s Watson was smart enough to win Jeopardy, and suddenly everyone around the world wished there was a Watson app for their smartphones. Actually, there almost is. WolframAlpha is an online version of Mathematica that does way more than solve math problems. It can tell you how much caffeine is in your coffee, or how long it is until the next lunar eclipse. Oh, and it’s pretty good at showing you how to solve your Calculus problems, too.

Best of all, with its new Wolfram|Alpha Pro subscription, you can save your searches, export diagrams and graphs in a variety of formats, and upload your own data to crunch with Wolfram|Alpha’s power. It’s a great way to turn your browser into a high-tech research lab!

Price: Free; $4.99/month pro subscription

TypingWeb

Whether you already know how to type and want to improve your typing speed, or are looking for a way to teach your child to type, TypingWeb is one of the best ways to learn. It works similar to the traditional typing tutorial programs, except this time, you can run it anywhere in any browser.

Price: Free; $9.99 upgrade for premium account
AppStorm Article: ArticleLink

StackExchange

StackExchange might be more of a content site than a traditional web app, but it’s quickly becoming one of the most useful apps online. It’s a network of question-and-answer sites with amazingly high quality answers for almost anything you can think of. From questions about writing to UFOs to cooking, there’s a wide variety of content in addition to their traditional programming and IT answers. There’s even a dedicated site about web apps!

Price: Free

Code School

Try Ruby!

Want to learn to program in Ruby without installing it on your computer or learning how to use cryptic commands? Try Ruby! gives you an interactive Ruby prompt right in your browser that you can use to learn the basics of Ruby programming. Combine this with the free online eBook Learn to Program, and you’ll be coding away in no time! Best of all, it’s now been upgraded with the new Code School site, which offers advanced lessons in programming with integrated online IDEs that make it easier to learn how to code online.

Price: Free; Code School classes vary in pricing

Visible Body

Struggling through your biology classes, or trying to make science come alive for your students? Visible Body gives you a way to see all of the major parts of the human body in a high quality interactive app. Doctors could use it to show patients exactly what’s wrong, or students could study the skeletal system from any browser. It’s an example of how education could be much more interactive and hands-on in an increasingly digital future.

Price: $14.95/month; $17.95/term for students

Google Sky

Google Sky, Moon, Earth, and Mars

We all rely on Google Maps to find our way around town, or to the other side of the country, or even to walk from the White House to Envato’s Headquarters. But did you know you can use Google to explore the next frontier, too? Google Sky, Moon, and Mars have tons of imagery from NASA and more that can help you explore space. Keep searching, and perhaps you’ll be the first to find the little green men.

Price: Free

Music

The web has already changed how we listen to music. Many people open Pandora, Grooveshark, or even YouTube when they’re wanting to listen to something. Now, you can even create music directly from your browser, too!

Noteflight

Noteflight is a beautiful app to write and edit sheet music in your browser. You can play your creations using the built-in high quality instrument sounds, export your files in standard MusicXML and MIDI formats, and share your sheet music with the world.

Price: Free; $49/year premium account

Aviary Roc

Do you ever get a tune stuck in your head that you’d love to turn into a real piece of music? Roc from Aviary gives you the tools you need to create loops and more right in your browser. With over 50 instruments, an easy to use soundboard, and a variety of export options, you can create the tunes you want and use them anywhere. All from your browser.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: Magical Music Creation With Roc from Aviary

Aviary Myna

Aviary Myna is a full-featured audio editing and mixing suite web app. You can create mixes from the built-in loops, import your own recordings or loops from Roc, or even record your own voice. Then, fade the audio as you need, add effects, and make it sound just like you like.

Price: Free

Spreaker

If you’ve always wanted to be a DJ, here’s your chance. Spreaker lets you mix music and audio professionally, then live broadcast the web show you’ve always dreamed of. Hey, you could create your loops online, the broadcast them online, too!

Price: Free; $12.90/month

Audiotool

Audiotool is an impressive audio mixer that runs entirely in your browser. Use effect boxes, synths, drum kits, and more to get the sound you want, all using realistic-looking tools and instruments.

Price: Free

Grooveshark

While most music streaming services work essentially like standard radio stations, Grooveshark gives you an interactive way to listen to the music you want to online. Search for a song you like, and Gooveshark automatically finds similar songs to stream to you. As you add your preferences, it’ll get smarter, and customize your playlist exactly for your tastes.

Price: Free; $6-$9 subscription
AppStorm Article: The Search For Better Music Streaming: Grooveshark

Spotify

If there’s one web app that has captured the world’s imagination in the past year, it’s Spotify. For once, Europe got a web service before the US, and users around the world would love to tap into the most comprehensive music service. With over 13 million tracks available for streaming, it represents the future of music as much as Netflix represents the future of video. If only they both could be available internationally.

Price: Free; £4.99-£9.99/month

Entertainment

If music’s not enough, there’s plenty more entertainment online. With the richer web apps and faster broadband services, the sky’s the limit … if telcos would stop capping download limits!

Hulu

While Europeans have Spotify, American at least have Hulu. The major TV networks managed to work together enough to get a site with streaming versions of most TV shows, allowing many to ditch the dish and cable. Now if we could just figure out how to get internet without an ISP…

Price: Free; Hulu Plus – $7.99
AppStorm Article: Cutting the Cord: Is Hulu the Answer?

Netflix

Netflix started out as an innovative movie rental system, mailing classic red envelopes with DVDs across the country. They’ve made an impressive transition to streaming movies over the internet now, and you can use it to ditch the disks right along with the dish and cable. For the price of 2 iTunes rentals, you can watch all the movies and shows you want, straight from the internet.

Price: $7.99

OnLive

There are many impressive online games, but most aren’t nearly as advanced as console games on the Xbox and Playstation, or even standard PC and Mac games. OnLive is an interesting service that runs games on their servers, then streams them to your browser or mobile device. Now, anyone can play console-quality games from almost any device!

Price: Free account; pay per game
AppStorm Articles about OnLive

Writing

Whether writing is a hobby or your job, the information age has made writing more important than ever. Here’s some web apps to help you out, letting you jot down and share your ideas easier than ever.

Writeboard

37signals has a knack for making useful apps that are incredibly simple to use and at the same time more useful than many more advanced tools. Writeboard hits the perfect mix of features for simple collaborative writing. With Textile formatting, full revision control, and a simple, no-accounts way to share your document, it’s an easy way to work together with a team or by yourself on a writing project.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: Writeboard: Wikis That Actually Make Sense

QuietWrite

Apps like iA Writer and OmmWriter have reminded the world that sometimes, the fewer distractions you have, the better. QuietWrite brings this same sensibility to the web. The whole interface fades away as you write, letting you focus on your words. You can then save and publish what you’ve written, or revert to previous versions in a click.

Price: Free

Sync.in

For a time, Etherpad was the best way to write collaboratively, or just to write on your own in a clean, private interface. You could roll back your changes, edit in real-time with others, and export your document to save and share. However, it was bought out by Google, and the team moved on to work with Google Wave and Google Docs. Today, the code for Etherpad is opensource, and Sync.in is one of the best new services based on it. It’s a great way to work together on documents, no matter what size of team you have.

Price: Free; $2/month
AppStorm Article: Get Going With Sync.In for Real-Time Collaboration

Grammarly

The internet, along with cellphone text messages, is often blamed for making our spelling and grammar worse. There’s no reason your web writing can’t be top notch, though. Grammarly offers high quality grammar and spelling correction, and can even make sure your writing isn’t plagiarizer. Colleges are using it already to check work, so you might as well check your own work first, too!

Price: Free; paid pro accounts

Paprika

Paprika is a unique way to keep up with anything: notes, tasks, your random thoughts, the chapters of the novel you’re writing. It’s a plain-text web app that uses Textile formatting to let you include your tasks and notes together on a clean sheet of digital paper. It’s elegant and simple formatted writing.

Price: Free; $5/month
AppStorm Article: Paprika: Minimalist Task Management

After the Deadline

After the Deadline is an Automattic service that lets you check the spelling, grammar, and writing style directly in WordPress and many other web apps. You can even check your own writing directly online, and get tips for how to make it sound better.

Price: Free

Email

The communications tool most of us rely on the most, email has survived from the beginnings of wired computer communications. Everyone thinks they can make a better way to communicate than email, and then even Facebook and Google end up admitting that when it all comes down to it, email’s king. At least there’s some great email web apps!

Gmail

Gmail is the reason most of us manage our email in our browsers, and it finally made webmail worth using. Its 1Gb of free storage, revolutionary at its release, would see terribly small today, but the steady improvements have kept it the best webmail service out there. It’s one app most of us rely on ever single day.

Price: Free
AppStorm Articles about Gmail

MailChimp

Sending out bulk emails is boring, but MailChimp has managed to make it one of the most fun parts of running a campaign. With friendly branding, an easy to use app, and amazingly great pricing, it’s won over everyone from small groups to big brands. It’s likely the easiest way to send emails to a group, no matter how small (or large).

Price: Free; $10+/month

Communications

We’re a social bunch of people, and the web has given us more ways to talk to each other than ever before. Often, oddly enough, without actually talking.

Campfire

Campfire may be the easiest way to get your team chatting about your projects online. It’s a snap to setup, works blazing fast, and lets you go back anytime and see what’s been said. You can even add pictures and other files just by dragging and dropping them into the app from your desktop.

Price: Free; $12+/month.

IRCCloud

IRCCoud

IRC is the original internet chat and communications protocol, but traditionally you’d have to use a desktop or terminal program to use it. IRCCloud brings IRC to the web, so you can keep up with old chat rooms or start a new IRC chat for your team all from your browser.

Price: Free while in beta

HipChat

HipChat takes group chat to the next level, by turning it into a collaboration platform. You can easily separate into rooms to have private group conversations, or keep a more open room for a virtual watercooler. You can even break off into private one-to-one chats in a click. With Twitter-like @mentions, attachment support, and teleconferencing, it’s a great way to keep your team together.

Price: Free; $9+/month

Fuze Meeting

Fuze Meeting can bring your team together with HD video chat and up to 100 participants. It’s a great way to talk about your plans or show off new designs, without having to have everyone in the same room or purchase expensive teleconferencing equipment.

Price: $9.99 individual meetings; $29+/month

Meebo

There are too many chat networks to keep up with them all. Meebo lets you easily chat with all of your friends in one online integrated environment, without having to sign into dozens of networks.

Price: Free

IM+

The popular cross platform chat client on smartphones and the iPad has made its way to the web. IM+ lets you talk with your Gtalk, AIM, Skype, MSN, and even ICQ friends and more, all from a nicely designed web app. There’s no reason to log into a dozen services again.

Price: Free

Office

We’ve got real work to do, and the web is ready to help. There’s tons of office apps on the web today, that can help your team keep working wherever you are.

Google Docs

The king of online productivity apps, Google Docs is the go-to app for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online. While their apps may be spartan, they include most of the features you need to create essays, business reports, financial spreadsheets, and more. Best of all, they’re gaining a new HTML5 offline mode this summer!

Price: Free
AppStorm Articles about Google Docs

Office Web Apps

Microsoft Office Web Apps

Microsoft waited as long as it could to bring it’s Office suite to the web, but they did a quite nice job with it once they did turn it into a web app. The Office Web Apps look and work much like their desktop counterparts. Even if you don’t use them, there’s a great way to make sure your Google Docs or iWork document will look ok on a colleague’s PC.

Price: Free

LucidChart

When you need to create a workflow diagram, or open a Visio chart, LucidChart is the app for you. This advanced HTML5 charting app makes you feel like you’re using a full-powered desktop diagramming app. Only this time, it’s on the cloud.

Price: Free; $4.95+/month
AppStorm Article: Creating Charts & Diagrams With HTML5 in LucidChart

Acrobat.com

Adobe’s Acrobat.com includes a very nice online word processor, Buzzword, as well as new online spreadsheet and presentation tools. Their main focus now, however, is on Adobe ConnectNow, their teleconferencing app. While this is a nice tool too, don’t overlook Buzzword. It’s a surprisingly nice app that doesn’t get enough attention.

Price: Free; $14.99+/month
AppStorm Article: Cloud-based Documents Contender: Acrobat.com

Zoho

In the world of productivity web apps, Zoho’s set of apps often gets overlooked. That’s suprising, though, considering how much they offer. Zoho offers everything from an online office suite, to email, project management, a CRM, finance management tools, and a development tool to create new web apps without any coding. Zoho alone deserves its own roundup.

Price: Mix of free and paid plans
AppStorm Articles about Zoho apps

InVision

InVision makes it easy to create wireframes and prototype designs before you start creating new apps and sites. It can be hard to describe what you’re thinking of with designs, but InVision lets you create rich mockups quickly that let you put your idea into action.

Price: $9+/month
AppStorm Article: Quick Look: InVision

LogMeIn

Sometimes, you’ll accidentally forget that important file at home, or need to fix your boss’ computer while you’re on vacation. LogMeIn lets you get on the computer you need from any browser, whether you’re in your living room or a hotel lobby in Tahiti.

Price: Free basic account, variety of premium offerings

Images

A picture speaks a thousand words, so we’ll let these creative apps speak for themselves.

Photoshop.com

Adobe hasn’t ported all of Photoshop to the web, but Photoshop.com does offer some nice photo tools when you need to edit something in a hurry. Similar to their mobile apps, you can quickly crop and touch up photos, then add a variety of popular effects and more. When you’re finished, you can share you pictures in an online gallery.

Price: Free

Sumo Paint

Sumo Paint includes an impressive array of painting and photo editing features that could rival desktop Photoshop. It includes dozens of advanced effects and brushes, layering and blending tools, filters, and more. If you want to take your web tool offline, the pro version lets you keep working with this impressive web app even with the internet is down.

Price: Free; 19€

deviantART muro

Who would have thought of deviantART creating their own web app? deviantART muro is an impressive example of the powerful things you can do with HTML5 today. This painting app can work with your Wacom tablet, so you can make the best painted modern art you can right from your browser.

Price: Free; pro features available

Aviary Phoenix

Aviary has the best set of creative tools on the internet, and their image editor Phoenix is no exception. You can create amazing composite images and tweak your photos in ways that would otherwise take advanced apps like Photoshop. Then, the new companion app, Feather, lets you do the basic photo edits directly in HTML5, with an embeddable app you could build into other web apps.

Price: Free
AppStorm Articles about Aviary

Aviary Raven

Need to create vector logos and other images? Aviary Raven means you just might not have to get Adobe Illustrator after all. Raven lets you create vectors with powerful layer and path tools, so your images can be created online and still look professional.

Price: Free

Notes

We’ve all got too many things to remember each day, and there’s no way we’re going to remember the directions to put together that kit we found 3 years ago, or the way to get to Uncle George’s house. The web’s got tons of apps that can help you offload some of your brain’s work, so you don’t have to remember everything yourself.

Simplenote

When you need to quickly jot down some information, you usually don’t want to have to mess with formatting or settings. Simplenote offers one of the easiest ways to take plain text notes and keep they synced with your devices. You can also add Markdown formatting to your notes, share them with others to collaborate, and publish them as individual, quick web pages if you wish.

Price: Free; $1.99/month
AppStorm Article: Simplenote: Keeping Note Taking Hassle Free

Evernote

Evernote is easily one of the most popular online note apps, and with the recent updates to their web app, it’s a first-class web citizen, too. You can add notes, images, PDFs, and more, then quickly search and find anything you need, anytime, anywhere. With the Chrome web clipper, it’s a great tool to save notes about the stuff you find online, too.

Price: Free; $5/month
AppStorm Articles about Evernote

Springpad

Keeping your notes organized and easy to find can be as difficult as remembering them in the first place. Springpad tries to make this easier by automatically organizing and categorizing your notes. You can automatically import the links and notes you share online, or add items directly to Springpad, and it’ll keep them all easy to find when you need them.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: Set Up Your Personal Organizer with Springpad

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia and most other wikis you come across online. You can install it on your own server to run a wiki wherever you want. While it might be overkill for some projects, a private wiki can be a great way to keep up with your info. And if you already have a hosting account, it won’t cost anything extra to run!

Price: Free

Backpack

37signals Backpack is one of the easiest ways to jot down info and notes for your whole team. It works like a wiki that was designed for use without having to read a 300 page manual. Just drag and drop elements onto pages, format notes, lists, and more with simple textile formatting, and then keep up with what your team’s doing with status updates and a calendar. It’s a free-form way of managing your projects with notes, and works great!

Price: Free; $24+/month

Project Management

Whether you work alone or in a group, you need a solid way to keep up with your projects. The web is full of high quality project management tools, and here are some of the best.

Basecamp

Basecamp was the original Ruby on Rails web app, and has remained one of the most popular project management tools on the web. It’s simple to use, integrates with dozens of other web apps, and makes it easy to keep your team and clients working together on projects. It may not include features such as Gantt charts, but it does include the tools that most small teams need to stay on track. And best of all, it’s got a bold new refresh coming soon, that will keep it the productivity app to beat.

Price: Free; $24+/month

Freckle

Freckle is a simple and stylish way to keep track of what’s getting done on your jobs. You can log time spent, tag it with the project, and quickly see where your team’s time has gone. It’s a great solution for freelancers, and can help you keep focused without a boss breathing down your neck.

Price: $12+/month
AppStorm Article: Using Freckle to Manage Your Time

Project Bubble

Project Bubble is a newer project management tool that offers an impressive amount of features for your money. You can easily manage projects, track time, keep up with files, create invoices, and more, all from the same app. Instead of spreading your business across multiple app, you can keep everything focused and streamlined in one app.

Price: $12+/month

Rule.fm

Rule.fm is a beautifully designed team management tool that combines project management, tasks, calendars, files, contacts, and more with the simplicity of a social network. You can quickly get a view of what’s going on with your team right from the front page. With future updates, you’ll be able to keep up with your finances and customers all from the same app, too.

Price: Free; $24+/month
AppStorm Article: Can rule.fm Streamline Your Business?

Projecturf

Projecturf brings Mac-style design to project management, with enough features to work for everything from small teams to major enterprises. You can plan your projects with milestones and Gantt charts, view graphs of your project progress, time, and more.

Price: $9.99+/month
AppStorm Article: Swift Project Management With Projecturf

Harvest

Harvest makes it easy to keep track of the time spent on your projects, and then turn your time into invoices quickly. It integrates with Basecamp to give you an integrated project management, time tracking, and invoicing solution.

Price: Free; $12+/month
AppStorm Articles about Harvest

Desk.com

Desk.com (formerly Assistly)

As your project progresses, you’ll likely need to begin offering support to your customers. Desk.com makes it easy to keep all of your support information together. You can respond to email and web-submitted support tickets, create documentation with private notes for quick support, and generate your knowledge base from your most used support issues. Originally known as Assistly, Desk.com is now part of the Salesforce family of apps, and has emerged as one of the most integrated support tools on the market.

Price: First full-time agent free; $49/month for additional full-time agents or $1/hour for part-time agents

Money

Whether you’re managing a business or your own personal life, you’ll need to keep up with your finances. Here’s some great apps to help you keep up with your money.

Mint

Mint is one of the most popular ways to manage your personal finances online. Started out as an easier solution to traditional desktop programs like Quicken, Mint was later bought out by Quicken’s parent company to help give their company a fresh new face. Mint is still one of the easiest ways to see what you’ve been spending, and find ways to save.

Price: Free
AppStorm Article: Mint.com – A Fresh Look at Your Finances

FreshBooks

If you’re working with clients, sending out invoices can be one of the more frustrating parts of doing business. FreshBooks makes this a bit simpler, by letting you create invoices simply online and then collect payments via Paypal. You can even use FreshBooks to keep up with your time and expenses, so you’ll know exactly what you need to bill your clients.

Price: Free; $19.95+/month
AppStorm Article: Easy Time Tracking and Invoicing With Freshbooks

Blinksale

Blinksale lets you create unlimited invoices for unlimited clients for one low price per month. If this wasn’t enough, they also have a new billing system, Blinkpay, that lets you receive your payments directly quicker than ever. It’s not just invoicing, it’s a whole finance system for your team.

Price: $15/month
AppStorm Articles about Blinksale

LastPass

LastPass is one of the best ways to keep up with all of your passwords for everything you use online. It’s not just great for keeping your financial data secure, but if you keep all of your passwords strong, you’re much less likely to have any of your accounts hacked. It may not be the nicest designed service, but it sure is handy.

Price: Free; $1/month premium
AppStorm Articles about LastPass

Reading

The internet has made it easier than ever to keep up with the news, but many sites don’t make reading that enjoyable. Here’s how you can keep up with your reading with the same style magazines and newspapers provided.

Google Reader

One of the best ways to keep up with your favorite sites is by subscribing to their RSS feed. Google Reader remains one of the best web apps for keeping up with your favorite feeds. Even the newest feed reader apps usually rely on your Google Reader account to stay up to date. With similar keyboard shortcuts to Gmail, it might be the easiest feed reader to use, too.

Price: Free

Instapaper

Instapaper is one of the best ways to save articles to read later. When you come across longer articles throughout the day, just add them to your reading queue with the bookmarklet, then come back and read the clean articles when you have time. With the Instapaper iOS app, it’s one of the web apps I use the very most.

Price: Free; $1/month
AppStorm Article: Why Instapaper & Read It Later Apps Can Boost Your Productivity

Readability

Readability brings a beautiful reading experience to your browser. Similar to Instapaper, you can save articles to read later, and tweak you reading interface to make it look just like you want. It also lets you give back to the authors of your favorite articles, by splitting 70% of you monthly fee between the authors of the articles you’ve read in a month.

Price: $5+/month
AppStorm Article: Readability: The Web Wins, Again

Dashboards

Whether you need to keep up with the news or your site’s traffic, these dashboard apps give you quick access to your most important information.

Geckoboard

If you’ve ever wished your office had a status board as awesome as Panic’s, wish no more. Geckoboard makes it incredibly easy to put together a beautiful status board that automatically updates with data from the apps you use. Stats never looked so delicious before!

Price: Free; $9+/month
AppStorm Article: Create Your Own Status Board With Geckoboard

Netvibes

Netvibes has long been popular as a personal homepage, where you can keep track of all your favorite sites and info right from one page. They’ve kept their service modern, with support for social networks. And, they’ve added business dashboards, too, so you can use it to keep track of your company’s data as well as your favorite sites.

Price: Free for personal dashboards; $499/month for professional dashboards

Feedly

Feedly automatically creates a dashboard of news and information for you from your favorite sites and topics. It works on all popular mobile devices, but looks just as nice in your browser, too. It’s a quick way to stay on top of the news and more without having to subscribe to dozens of sites.

Price: Free

Websites

Most of us need to create websites at some point or another. Used to, this meant dusting off an HTML editor and designing a site from scratch. Today, there are many web apps that can make it a snap to create the site you’ve always dreamed of.

WordPress

WordPress is the amazing blogging engine behind an increasing number of sites across the web, including the AppStorm network. You can use it for free directly from WordPress.com, or download the software and run it on your own server for free. It’s so useful and versatile, we can’t imagine the web without it!

Price: Free
AppStorm Articles about WordPress

DropPages

DropPages is a very new app that uses Dropbox and Markdown formatted documents as a basic way to create a quick site. You can edit all of your files locally on your computer, and the changes are online as soon as Dropbox syncs. It’s a neat idea, and we’re excited how it grows and gets adopted in the near future.

Price: Free; £5/month

Squarespace

Squarespace is a beautiful hosted content management system that lets you easily create beautiful sites and blogs that work just like you want. You can edit the theme live, and see changes right while they’re being made. With seamless importing from other blogging systems, beautiful mobile apps, analytics and social network integration, and intricately designed themes, it might be the easiest way to get a full-featured site online.

Price: $12+/month
AppStorm Article: Publishing Yourself With Squarespace

Shopify

Ready to sell stuff online? Shopify makes it easy to get your digital storefront up and running. You can customize your store site by hand or with premium themes, see statistics about your traffic and who ends up buying, and extend your store form the Shopify App Store.

Price: $29+/month

Wufoo

Hand-coding forms for surveys, applications, and more can be time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Wufoo lets you create customized forms for anything you need in minutes. You can use them to sell items via Paypal, accept applications to jobs at your company, or just make a stylish contact form for your site.

Price: Free; $14.95+/month

Polldaddy

Polldaddy is one of the easiest ways to create polls and surveys online. You can create unlimited polls for free, which are incredibly easy to embed into your site or share on social networks. You can also create surveys with up to 100 responses per month for free, or upgrade for unlimited surveys that will work for firms of any size.

Price: Free; $200+/year

Profile Pages

Need somewhere to show off what you’re doing online and off? These popular profile apps give you a digital business card so others can quickly learn more about you.

About.me

About.me lets you quickly create a profile page with your picture, your favorite sites, and a quick bio. It’s like a digital business card, complete with analytics about how many people have found your page and what they clicked on. Plus, you can even turn it into a real paper business card if you want!

Price: Free

Chi.mp

If you’ve ever wanted a short URL for your own personal page, Chi.mp is a great option. It lets you show feeds from your own sites and social networks, all on your own unique .mp domain. You can even use your .mp domain as an OpenID, or take your domain with you later to another site if you want.

Price: Free

Carbonmade

Carbonmade is a beautifully designed portfolio site where you can show off your best creative work in style. It’s incredibly easy to use, and just flipping through the portfolios already on the site will help you see how Carbonmade can help you show off your creativity.

Price: Free; $12/month
AppStorm Articles about Carbonmade

Conclusion

There’s web apps for almost anything you can think of today, and tons of them are beautifully designed and feature-full apps. We’d love to hear which web apps you rely on daily, and if we’ve missed your favorite app, we’d love to hear why you think it’s the best!

The Newest Web Apps to Rule Them All

The Originals

Files

Presentations

Bookmarking

Diary

To-dos

Coding

Learning

Music

Entertainment

Writing

Email

Communications

Office

Images

Notes

Project Management

Money

Reading

Dashboards

Websites

Profile Pages

Conclusion

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